Stablecoin Financial OS Replacing Banks

Let's go. Let's go. Hit hit him with the confetti. Do we got the confetti? Is it ready? Yes. There we go. There it is. The first ever confetti

effect goes to you, Steph. How are we doing? We're doing well. Thanks so much for having me again. This is my second time. Yeah.

How how was TPPN yesterday? I think that's what the question that's on both

of our minds. It was good, but I was just, you know, talking to somebody saying this was prep for StableDash. Right? So I was just, you know, that was training and now now I'm here. So stablecoins guys. So that's great. Yeah. How is the conversation different? You know, you go you go in front of that audience. Like, do you feel like I don't wanna say dumb it down, but, like, do you do you consciously, like, kinda change the language a little bit? Look. Our our go to market team would love me to do that.

They would love me to also say things that are clippable. At the end of day, though, when I get on these, you know, streams and calls and whatever it is, it's just I really want to just speak my mind, right, and say what I actually think. Sometimes I get, you know, too far into technical. Sometimes I actually say things that I think work well, but being authentic is important to me because I think, you know, we we just you gotta do it. Right? And so I think that's that's where I come from.

But yeah, I think yesterday, it was we got technical a little bit, but then we, you know, talked more about the general stablecoin adoption and why we think it matters. And so I think it went well. But definitely, the audience is different. Right? Like, you guys you know, people who are watching StableDash, they're they definitely understand a lot more about how the market's moving and, you know, where things are going. And so we can have a more, I guess, transparent dialogue as well. Yeah.

So thinking about that with the, yeah, the audience that might be listening to this right now who maybe they're familiar with squads historically.

They saw the news yesterday. Maybe they've tuned into a stable minded episode or two. And they're familiar with altitude, but I think there is an opportunity to go deeper, maybe educate. And specifically for me, I'd I'd love for you to speak a little bit about the the evolution and focus now really, really specifically in altitude as a product and really why you decided strategically to focus primarily on that. You know, the hero of the story yesterday was not the suite of things that Squads does.

It was Altitude specifically. And maybe speak a little bit about where that conviction came from. Yep.

We started from a very crypto native and infrastructure focused place. We originally built Squad's protocol, which was the first layer in the stack where we had to figure out how you can build programmable wallet infrastructure that can secure a lot of value and help sort of larger institutions and organizations in the space to manage their digital assets. That was the first arc.

Then we moved up the stack a little bit and built the the product layer on top that allowed these sort of organizations to interact with the primitives that were built on the infrastructure side. The next arc was really like, Fuse was was very much about how can you take all this infrastructure and build a simple money app that helps consumers take stablecoins and and do regular things with them when it comes to money. Grid was all about the sort of infrastructure layer on top of the protocol. Right?

Can we fix compliance? Can we figure out how to do money movement on chain and off chain and integrate it deeply with the infrastructure that we built before and the product layer on top? And so Altitude is a natural extension of this journey. Right?

It's essentially building on everything we have developed up to this point and saying, we're gonna focus on a very narrow well, it's not that narrow, but it's a narrow problem relative to other things we've been doing of essentially helping businesses run their financial operations. And it's leveraging Squad's protocol. It's leveraging Grid.

It's leveraging all the learnings that we have developed over building FUSE and figuring out how we can make stablecoins useful to regular people and really positioning it towards solving this very specific problem of how you as a business can go bankless and and actually run your business on a programmable wallet account with stablecoins soon with agents running things on top. And so that is really where we're coming from. And to us, it feels very natural.

Like, we we have been going towards that for quite a while, but actually reintroducing Altitude to the world yesterday and kinda talking about the core values that we we care about and when we're building this product. It was very important. It was a big deal for us, and there's a lot more things now coming as we have kind of done the done the first major step.

But, yeah, it was absolutely, you know, crucial to to our strategy, and and I think a lot more people now are familiar with with Altitude and understand what we're trying to do. And I think the aspect of of the the banklessness of it. Right? It's not that you completely kind of forget about banks. Right? It's the idea that using Altitude gives you a lot more flexibility in the sense of you can use banking rails if you want. You can use stablecoin rails. You can spend it on a card.

Soon, you'll be able to have an agent that does transactions on your behalf. But because the architecture is naturally programmable, right, like every layer in the stack is now programmable when you're using Altitude as a product as a business trying to run their their operations,

it it just naturally gives us so much more room to to build amazing experiences for customers, but also for you as a business that gives you that choice and flexibility into this in in deciding how you're actually gonna manage your money. Yeah. I wanted to to dive deeper into that, that financial OS versus banks. And I think a lot of in our conversations, you know, we're talking to Tanner from Stable.

See, when we think about managing our operations, we like to think big multinational corporations, not the not the 20, you know, the 20 person ecommerce company that may be doing, you know, $12,000,000 a month. I and we've obviously talked about how you're building for these founders on the frontiers that are maybe one day they become these multinational corpse. But for now, they're the fifteen, twenty people that are they're building this business in this, Internet economy across multiple different verticals.

What do where do you see it going, and what needs do you see that they're going to have that require a financial operating system more than a traditional bank, especially in the context of Agenci Commerce? Because I think a lot of people, it's the okay. I'm gonna use my agent to book my flight, and maybe that's a part of it. But what more what are they not thinking about that Altitude

can or is going to be able to do? So the the the reason we call it the financial s over just, you know, a bank account or a business account is because we think that saying it's it's just an account is reductive to the actual product that we're building. Right? The idea here is that we want to cover as much as possible of the FinOps stack that you're operating today with a single product. Right?

And I think there's a lot of value in like, even when we talk about very cryptonative teams that already manage stablecoins at scale that have moved into this world, you know, a couple years before, their life today is all about they have a, you know, maybe a Coinbase account for Onoframs. They have Mercury for banking. They have Brex for cards. They have a multisick to secure majority of that treasury.

Even for those teams, we're collapsing this, you know, these five tools into a single product that that makes it very easy for them to manage their operations, and then also gives them a single system, a single ledger so there's no kind of mess in reconciling it from a perspective of accounting. And it just makes their life much easier. So that's the, like, that's the frontier argument.

When you think about sort of businesses that are not building in crypto, that are not already on stablecoins, the real value here is on one hand, because we're building on this very different stack, we're able to build a superior product when it comes to things like access, velocity, and autonomy. These are sort of the core properties we think about when we are developing the product, but also these are the types of customers we're after that care about those things. Right?

And so from a perspective of access, it's really you can actually get an Altitude account from a lot more places than you can get a lot of these traditional, you know, fintech business accounts or, obviously, traditional banking tools that are very kind of geographically restricted to to a specific place where they're at. That that's kind of one aspect of the of how you think about access. The other one is through Altitude, you get access to the blockchain ecosystem. Right?

You essentially can you can do on chain effects. You can obviously do stablecoin supplements. We're gonna be introducing a lot more features that expose the customer to all these opportunities that are existing in the on chain economy. Right? And so that's the access component of it. The velocity is obviously that if we're moving funds on stablecoins. Like, it's a magical moment when you're you can send somebody a million dollars, and it happens in seconds. It's instant. It's twenty four seven. Right?

It's it's an incredible feeling. It's a magical moment when when you do this for the first time. But then also, it's sort of the core value of the product itself. Right? Like, every action should be kind of thought through of thought through the kind of lens of how can we make this as efficient as possible. Right? How can we help you move as fast as possible? Because you as a business operator, like, you don't you don't want to wait. You don't want to kinda deal with those things.

And then the autonomy component is really sort of the the newer thing we're introducing. And you're seeing all these incumbents in different business accounts and sort of the fintech space saying, you now have a CLI or, like, we give you a bunch of agents to do things. We think it's it's great and that they're pushing sort of the the space forward. But when every layer in the stack is naturally programmable, this is where agents can not just advise you or give you interesting data.

Is where agents can actually execute. Right? This is where you can do end to end automations. And I think this is also something we we strongly believe in that when the money is programmable, you're able to get to this place where the the velocity increases, and you essentially have this perpetual movement of money where you have to do a lot less as an operator. Right? Like, you essentially as somebody who's running a business, you don't need to worry about kind of the the core operational workflows.

You you set those rules and parameters, then they just execute. And so this is the core vision for Altitude down the line. I would say, today, we're very much focused on helping businesses that are already adopting stablecoins and having a pretty bad time in in terms of figuring out how to manage their operations when they have the stablecoin component to their business. But the the space is, obviously, there's a lot room for us to grow and a lot of customers to focus on.

But today, this is really about, you know, in many ways, customers like yourself where you have stablecoins that you need to accept, you have a balance sheet that you need to manage, and making sure that your experience is is on par with traditional business accounts and better is really the core focus. On par or better? Yeah. Think We're so you probably have a lot of opinions on this, you know, the the CLI and the moment that we're in in terms of what happens next versus

maybe today versus a year versus five years. How are you thinking about, you know, even just even right now, like, activating what's possible in the world of allowing agents to embed themselves or become utilized within Altitude, how do you maybe think about what that will look like this year versus five years from now? And how how are you thinking about the user experiences for these companies that you're trying to create that makes makes this approachable

in the current moment we're in? And where do those wedges begin to start happening within the product in your view? I think in the in the short to midterm, there's two things that I'm most excited about, and I think are very realistic. One is agents as as means of procuring software. Right? As means of buying things for for for you as an operator or as a company that's building things. Right?

Because I think the way to think about it maybe when you use Claude, right, you have to go and buy a bunch of things, get these API keys, plug them in, and then you can actually build the thing you want to build. And then there is Replit, where essentially all of this is extracted on the back end. They procure all the services behind the scenes, you just pay Replit once.

And then I think we're moving towards a future where you will have your general purpose agent that has a bunch of tasks that it needs to do, and it will have autonomy in deciding what kind of services needs to procure to do the thing that you asked the agent to do upstream. And I think this is where when we think about Altitude specifically, it's like you can have a card to to spend, right, and to buy things, and then you'll have an agent. And they'll sort of exist side by side. Right?

I think that is something that is very realistic. I think the work that the Temple guys are doing with MPP and bringing these services providers on chain. Right? Like, you can pay for API credits technically today to OpenAI, to Anthropic. Right? That that is all now possible for MPP. I think this is just gonna continue accelerating. Right?

And because you as a as somebody who's running a business, you will start trusting agents more to make those decisions that that are, in some cases, more micro, in some cases, more macro. But at the end of the day, which sort of database you use or kind of some of these decisions that happen downstream of the core task of building a product for you, you will trust the agent to do. And so having the agent actually control a wallet with stablecoins makes a lot of sense.

The second thing is really the idea of starting to have agents control meaningful parts of your financial operations. Right? What that can mean is an an automated accounts payable. Right? So you design a system where you have a certain white list of vendors that you know that they're gonna invoice you every month. Right?

And you can say the vendor you know, if the email that I got this invoice from, if the amounts are the same, if the addresses are the same, the banking details are the same, and and obviously the range that I expect the invoice to be in is all kind of matches, then I'll let my agents do this end to end for me. I do think by the end of the year, you'll see it on Altitude, and I'm sure there's gonna be kind of a a broader push in the space to start bringing those end to end automated experiences.

Because today, agents really allow you to, like, you know, you can ask things about your account. Right? You can get better data, but they can't really execute on your behalf yet. And I think this is a very powerful property of of actually pairing agents that can be, you know, chaotic, and and it's, you know, it's it's an intelligence that's very raw today.

And pairing it with this very rigid and and kind of fixed system of blockchain where things can be sometimes a little bit inefficient, but they're great for solving trust. And so those are the two things that in the sort of short to midterm, I think are gonna be very impactful.

I think down the line, sort of five years out, right, the the the vision is really that you when you create an account for your business, you design all these rules and parameters, and the system really understands well what your business is about, what's your business model, you know, how many people you have at the company, who needs to be interacting with the account.

And then you essentially get this kind of automated working template that just executes itself, right, and plugs into all the necessary systems that it needs to plug into. I don't think we're quite there yet, but I think the future is really that you just do less. Right? And so five years out, you as an operator will approve things at the outset. There will be certain things flagged for you, but you, you know, the and also sort of the less you touch the system, the better the experience is for you. Right?

And so I think as an operator, you want to focus on the business. Right? You want to continue growing the company and, you know, focusing on and be focusing on other things. And I think this is really becoming a reality with a system like Altitude, but then also with all the innovation that's happening in the space. Yeah. When we think about the idea of actually letting agents

do the action and perform the transaction or whatever the use case is, we run into a lot of complexity around around that, whether that's, like, the the signing rights, custody, compliance, all these things that now have to happen, especially by giving giving authority or giving the ability for an agent to do something on chain on your behalf. I'd imagine you've spent a lot of time thinking about this.

What is the advantage that you have in this conversation given the history of the multisig that that you've built in house? How are you thinking about some of the complexity around these types of transactions and and maybe the the groundwork that you've laid with Squads in recent years to prepare you guys for this for this moment? So the way to think about squads protocol is multisig is is sort of one way you can configure a programmable object on chain that you can deploy using the protocol.

And what and one of the unique properties of it is that everything is programmable. Right? So you can design all these rules and policies and parameters that can say this key that is interacting with this account has these limitations. It can only interact with these five addresses. It has these spending limits. And if, you know, spending limit is hits, then you need to get another approval. Maybe it's a human, maybe it's another agent. So the system is really versatile to kind of facilitate those use cases.

And I think when the underlying layer is a bank and there's a bunch of humans making decisions and there's maybe some APIs on top, it's just naturally much harder to do the same. And so our advantage is just the fact that from our perspective, the place where you store the money and where you move the money from is a programmable object on the blockchain. Right? And so this decoupling is really what allows for the innovation.

Because if everything settles in the end, you know, to a bank and the custody of the the money is is is in a bank account over a programmable object on chain, you will naturally run into limitations. And so I think from our perspective, that is really the unique property. And, like, multisig is a very kind of simple way to say, okay. Here's a threshold, if enough signers sign the transaction, then it's now executable and you can go and do it.

I think the the place we're going to is is that it's it's just gonna be a lot more granular. Right? Like, you're gonna have a an agent that has a key that has a limited set of rights, what it can and cannot do on the account. And then in certain cases, the threshold moves up and and basically the agent cannot do the execution on their own. They require human approval. But having this programmable foundation just gives us that flexibility, and that's actually why because the system is so flexible and configurable.

This is one of the reasons, essentially, a year ago, we really decided to go the altitude direction because we wanted to create this, like, product layer that allows us to focus on solving very specific problems. Because one other route we could go to and say, like, look. Here's an API and a bunch of infrastructure that anybody can use to do whatever. That actually

creates more problems than it solves in a sense of we really wanted to channel this amazing technology into solving very specific problems for real customers. And so that is really where I think Altshift shines and, like, allows us to think, okay. Here's a business, have very specific needs. Let us use all the things that we've built up to this point to and, like, channel them in in into solving all these problems. It's a very different approach than we see in the market.

We've seen a lot of people out there who they start with maybe a, you know, b to b product or a consumer facing product, and then they say, I realize that if this infrastructure is actually what people want, we've kinda gone the opposite route where, hey. We've we've built this infrastructure. Now we say, we're not seeing anybody building the product that we think needs to be built for the customers. We're just gonna go do it ourselves.

And I think that's and correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that's really admirable, and we we don't see it too often in the space at at least recently. Solana led you around. Correct? So That's correct. Yeah. Solana led you around. Yeah. You've been in this ecosystem for a while. Speak a little bit about altitude. They just A lot of altitude.

What's that Relapse a lot of insight. It's a good relationship. And and, yeah, what's it been like watching them kinda go through these iterations, you know, from from launch, from FTX to the meme coin hype cycles to now really solidifying their spot in the Internet Internet capital markets conversation and and, you know, partnerships with Visa and Western Union coming out and launching a stable coin. Yeah. What's it been like being so so close with the team? I think the Solana team is amazing.

They've, as you mentioned, they've been through a lot. Right? And it was very you know, it was a bumpy road, but there was a lot of incredible moments. And then there were a lot of you know, like, FTX was a huge moment for us as a company as well. You know, the the whole ecosystem had to sort of re underwrite their beliefs and and decide to to go and, you know, kind of power through a very hard time.

I would say we today feel like Solana is our home from a kind of, you know, personal perspective, but also just there's so many people that we've been working with for many years now that we feel like, you know, they're very committed to to solving all these problems and and building, you know, a programmable blockchain that the world economy can rely on. We think this is powerful mission. I also think that Solana team is is kind of very focused on on solving very specific hard technical problems. Right?

There's an element to like, I think Solana is also really good at marketing, and they do amazing partnerships. But at the end of the day, it's all about the tech. Right? It's all about enabling developers to to build experiences that they want to build for their customers. And I think that's always been a focus for the Solana ecosystem, and I think Solana Foundation is doing, you know, a great job at at supporting this and then making sure that continues.

And so for us, it was when we started thinking about Altitude, it wasn't a big conversation internally. Like, what should we, you know, should we go and build it on another chain? Right? For us, our core infrastructure is built on Solana. We have been in the ecosystem for many years. And to us, it feels like Solana is the payments chain. Right? Because it has the right balance of scalability, decentralization, and a rich DeFi ecosystem you can tap into to build better experiences for your customers.

And so I think it's it's been, you know, four years for us at this point that we've spent in the ecosystem. And it's it's it's a lot of people that we know, and we we really think that seeing their commitments and throughout the years has been incredible. And so I think, yeah, we're very excited to partner with Solana Ventures on this round. And Solana Ventures, obviously, was an investor before, and this is the round that they're actually leading for the first time with with Squads.

And, yeah, I mean, the the team, they're incredible.

I think Solana has, outside of the Squad's protocol, as as the core infrastructure for Altitude, I think there's a lot more things coming on the side of, you know, privacy and other components to to that will be very important to Altitude as a product that we're definitely gonna leverage from from the Solana ecosystem abroad. Really cool. Last sort of theme on my end before we we gotta push pause. I I wanna ask about just the way that we should be thinking about banks right now.

Nick touched on this quite a bit on Tuesday. Yeah. We're just we're in this really interesting moment where, like, banks aren't I mean, I guess you could argue that they are not going anywhere. They are they are going somewhere. They're some some people right now are arguing, like, you know, the banking system is is fine. Like, it's entrenched. We need it.

But the functionality that we're talking about here with Altitude is obviously so it's replacing a lot of what the relationship is that people have to banks historically, personally, and for their business. Where do you see because you guys, for Altitude, integrate a lot of these things into the stack. How should we now be thinking about the role that banks play in these modern money systems?

Like, what have they been playing? Where are they not gonna be winning? And what is the new kind of role that they play in your mind? I think banks are like, first of all, they're not going away. I think banks are gonna be around, and I don't think you know? I think their their role will transform. Right? And I think on one hand, when you think about stablecoins, the reserves need to sit somewhere. For some stablecoins, that will be cash in the bank. For others, that will be US treasuries sitting with a custodian.

And then in some cases, it can be backed directly by, you know, Federal Reserve. But I think banks will definitely play a role in holding reserves for stablecoins, and that that's how the role will transform on one side. On the other hand, for Altitude, banks to us are very modular, which is, you know, an amazing user experience for the customer because you now don't need to trust and, you know, hold your money into a a single bank.

Now the your money is in a programmable account on chain, but then if you want to settle through a specific rail, you can tap into, you know, bank in The US. You can tap into a bank globally. And this is also where the orchestration ecosystem plays a very valuable role. Right? Like, they essentially are this these middlemen that connect a system like ours to the banking system.

And I think it's it it is just a natural evolution where you decouple the account that stores the money and they and essentially, the the account that moves it. Right? And so I think both of these need to exist. But I think thinking of a bank as a place where you go and onboard and this is where you store the money and this is where the core workload workloads happen is kind of antithetical to, you know, the way Internet works. Internet is global. Everything is software.

And I think blockchains and stablecoins allow us to match sort of, you know, the global nature of the Internet to what, you know, money can be. And I think from that perspective, this is where, you know, banks will have to see their their grounds to other systems. But, you know and, also, you're gonna have new types of things. There's, right, that recently launched. You have Column that's doing amazing work, right, that are going software first. Right?

Like, for Column, I think they're probably talk talking about the fact that their business model is just you know, it's a SaaS based model. You pay for, you know, API calls. And so there's gonna be banks that really ride the wave correctly, but I think, overall, the nature of banks and how we interact with them will definitely change. And, you know, we're we're excited to bring this about. Yeah. Last question for me. This is kind of a funny one. This came to my mind.

If you let's just say there was a world where you were forced to no longer be running Altitude. You had to leave and give the business to someone else. Like this. And

and you were forcibly brought into a bank, like a major bank, and and you were incentivized to bring their systems up. Like, if if the focus of Stepan's new life was the bank, a traditional bank, what would you be doing? Like, what how would you enter that situation? What would you be advising them? How what would the approach be? Bank better? Yeah.

Like, what what's because you have this new class of banks that you've mentioned, which are awesome, and, like, they feel like they're the new cool kids and on the block with the banks. But then you have this huge, like, entrenched traditional banks. Like, if you if you were to go into one of those, what would be the first thing that you would do, like, the first week? I would I would I would make the the bank itself start thinking about the core business

as like, I would I would move it towards software and technology. Right? Like, you would essentially say, we're a technology company now. Right? And, yes, there's financial services that we sell. We have to move into a different world. Right? Because I think there's a lot of like, the entrenchment comes from complacency that there's you know, naturally, in a traditional world, you need to hold the money somewhere. And so you go to a bank, and it's just a natural step. I think that is really going away.

And so that's where I would start with. I would say, like, you know, the complacency arc of our business is over, and, like, we we now have to innovate and and disrupt. And then the second command to that would be is just figuring out how to not be geographically restricted. Right? Like, to be able to onboard customers globally, tap into the stablecoin space, tap into the blockchain space. But I would kinda think even more holistically and say, okay. We have a bunch of amazing resources. Right? We're we're licensed.

Customers trust us. How can we use those resources to address a much larger market? Right? And so that's where I probably would start. And then, obviously, you know, we can go into I I would maybe issue my own stablecoin and and go from there. I would say the starting point should be is just recognizing that just having a banking license or, you know, an OCC charter and then storing people's money, taking all the yield, and, you know, charging them fees on payments, that is over.

That's being democratized by, you know, the technology space. And so you either go there or you sort of get left behind.

Yeah. Is there a world where you, you know, in this new paradigm, potentially, if you were doing that job where, you know, Altitude, you use it. There's an app, and it's something that, we you as a business use. We've we've loved using this product. Is it also, you know, programmable

and kind of core enough where it could be something that could power that new technology paradigm for a bank one day? Is that or is that not the focus? You really wanna those two things kind of interoperable in your mind? I think nonetheless, definitely. Right? I think we're building a lot of infrastructure in house that can be very useful to a lot of these players. We kinda want to the reason we're so focused on the product is because we want to speed around to the end state. Right?

We wanna see how far we can take it and what does this look like on the other end, right, where your account is self custodial, where your money is programmable. And so we definitely want to to play this out to, you know, maximum extreme. And then on the other side, we'll we'll we'll have a bunch of infrastructure that we're sure is gonna be really valuable, and then we're gonna see who wants to adopt it. But I think today, focus is really on how far we can really take this. Yeah. It's amazing.

Excited to be in the journey with you, man. And I really, really this is cliche, but I do think that the story that you know, you you guys have been doing this. You're not you're not new to the game, but it it just feels so early for you guys. Like, the the addressable market here is absolutely massive. And I know this is even cheesy to think about, but I imagine, like, you know, a single mountain

or, like, a single I've had the amazing opportunity to climb a pretty significant mountain in my life. If you've done this, it's like, if you've actually reached the altitude point, you realize, like, oh my god. Like, this one single summit is just one of thousands and thousands and thousands of opportunities. I almost feel like right now for Altitude, you guys are at this moment where it's like, yeah, we've not reached this point in our journey that's really amazing. Yesterday was great.

We've accomplished so much, but now you have this vantage point of what's possible and what you can do now and how big the opportunity is. And, yeah, man, I'm just excited to see you guys conquer more more summits and see what you guys do. So that's my cheesy that's my cheesy visual as we end this segment. But, also, thank you for supporting the show and what we're doing on the media side. It's really fun to work with you guys. Your team's awesome. It was great to be with Garrett working with Phil.

You've you've you've accumulated some great folks around you guys, so good work.

Amazing. I appreciate it, and thank you for the kind words. And, yeah, excited to be partners with you guys. And I think we should yeah. Maybe we should climb a mountain together and do some recordings there. There's some content at the space. About frontier

dinners maturing into ski trips. That could be really fun. I mean, it just fits.